Traci

"Look, Mr Lytles, I really don't care about taking more of your money, and my boss absolutely doesn't care, and would be perfectly happy to keep taking more of it, but this has been a boring case, and I really think that you're wasting your dollars."

That was Jim Cramer, a private detective out of Lexington, and we were meeting at, of all places, the Parkette Drive-In restaurant off New Circle Road. I didn't want to meet anyplace in Winchester, my home town, because I sure didn't want anybody, especially any of my buddies from the firehouse, to spot me meeting with a PI. Too many questions if that ever became public!

I'm Raleigh Lytles, and I'd spent, like Jim said, too much money on having my wife Traci followed. I'm a fireman – I hate the politically correct term 'fire fighter'! – in Winchester, and Traci sells real estate. At 50, yeah, my sex life had waned a bit, which I had hoped wouldn't be the case now that the kids were grown and out of the house. My two 24-hour shifts a week kept me away from home for a couple nights, but it also meant that I had five days off during the week, which should be plenty of time to have some adult fun with my wife.

Traci, well yeah, I guess that I kind of robbed the cradle a bit, in that she was only 42, eight years younger than me, and at the age where women are supposed to be getting their horniest. We'd married when she was only 18, a bit of a shotgun wedding, since I'd knocked her up even before she graduated high school. Her parents weren't happy at all to find out that their precious baby girl had been fucking a rookie fireman in his mid-twenties, but Hell, was it my fault that they'd let their little hottie daughter go out to wild parties while she was still in high school.

OK, OK, they didn't exactly let her go; she snuck out of the house, met up with her equally hot friends, and they knew where to go. They drank, they smoked weed, and they fucked, and what more could a guy my age have wanted? Only thing was that I couldn't smoke weed with them, 'cause firemen get drug tested regularly. I knew that I'd been lucky to get that job, because it paid a lot more than a college drop out could expect in Winchester, Kentucky. I was just an average sized guy, but I'm strong for my size, and I just plain slammed the physical tests, along with getting a bit lucky on the written portion.

So, for the horny 18-year-olds, yeah, I was looking good. Good enough that I was getting lucky regularly, right up until Traci got knocked up.

Oops!

Well, even knocked up, Traci was a hottie, and she just plain loved to fuck, right up until her eighth month, when she just got too bloated to even think about it.

After Dana was born, I was as horny as a three-peckered billy goat, and Traci was rapidly getting back into the swing of things as well. We weren't supposed to get back at it so soon, but just 1½ weeks after giving birth we started screwing again. Traci was supposed to start the pill pretty soon, but, oops again! before she could get back into her old jeans, I had injected some of my genes into the target area, and voila, her fertile Myrtle persona manifested itself.

We wound up with three daughters in the first three years we were married. At that point, she decided to have her tubes tied! Good plan!

Our first sixteen years of marriage were tough ones. Firemen make decent working-class money, almost the same as cops, and my EMT certifications plus every other first responder school I could get the city to pay for had my wages near the top, but still, I was the only one bringing in money. I made sergeant within ten years, and lieutenant in another five. I knew that I'd never make fire chief, because that's too political a job even in a small town, and I'd managed to piss off my fair share of people, both early and often during my career.

But once Violet turned thirteen, Traci decided that she wanted to go to work. She did the housewife thing for sixteen years, and our teenaged girls were out of the house as much as in; you can only dust the furniture so often, you know!

Still, Traci had no college and no work history, so for a 34-year-old woman just entering the labor force, there wasn't much available other than waitressing and convenience store clerk jobs. Luckily, she tried a real estate agency, and since agents are paid on commission, the firm wasn't risking all that much to give her a shot. They told her that if she completed her real estate licensing course, they'd take her on.

Within four months, she'd completed the course, gotten her license, and was at work. And, despite it being 2010, the worst of the housing crisis, she sold a house her first month on the job, for full asking price. Even with half of the 6% commission going to the firm, Traci brought home almost $6,000 that first month.

Her second month, she sold another, and then another. Being on commission, her earnings were irregular, but it wasn't long before Traci was easily bringing in more money than I was.

And that's when Traci the hottie returned. With money no longer so tight, she was investing in her wardrobe, and had managed to hit, just right, the casual elegance look. She rarely wore skirts, but her pants, some of them jeans and some not, fit her perfectly, and her blouses were just loose enough to not be slutty while still looking like they were made just for her.

That was where having gotten through childbirth by age 21 helped her: she was able to regain her figure quickly, and kept it well into her thirties. Hey, her mom had done the same, so I was never worried that she'd have porked out.

But selling real estate meant some odd hours, as working people couldn't always look at houses during the day. That meant evenings, and it meant weekends.

It meant a lot of weekends, like almost every Saturday, and not a few Sundays. Even with my frequent days off, it meant a lot of time without Traci at home.

Too much time.

That was when my imagination started to get the better of me, that was when I started to wonder if Traci wasn't having some extra-curricular fun. Selling real estate meant meeting men, plenty of men, often during the evening, often away from the office, often in empty houses. If she had wanted to mess around, Traci had plenty of opportunity.

When she started, in 2010, the clientele were almost all married couples. The long-dragging recession had scared singles away from buying, at least in smaller towns. Traci had frequently lamented that she could have made so much more money in Lexington, where singles were buying property again – this was now 2014 – and prices were recovering, but neither one of us wanted to live in the city. I was close to making captain, and moving to Lexington would have put me right back at the bottom of the totem pole.

Around 2017, things started to change. Clark County, where Winchester was located, was a lot less expensive than Lexington's Fayette County, right next door, and there were some 'urban professionals' who were finding that they could get a lot more bang for their buck in Clark. The twenty-somethings all wanted urban apartments and some of the elegant older homes along Lexington's Richmond Road, but the ones in their thirties were seeing the value in the commute. There were a lot of upgradable farmhouses coming on the market, and Traci was good, really good, at selling them.

To single men, single men in her age range, younger than me.

That meant, as far as I could see, meeting younger men, most of them pretty good looking, who made more money than me, during weekday evenings and weekends. And high-school-educated-only Traci, meeting college-educated lawyers and brokers and financial planners and bankers, was selling the shit out of her properties. Because she was doing so well, she was the listing agent for the vast majority of the homes she sold, and that meant fewer ways to have to split commissions.

Don't get me wrong: she never brought home any 'surprises,' I never, not even once, thought that I was getting sloppy seconds. She never came home with that 'freshly fucked' look. But there were more nights than I cared for in which she got home a bit later than I had expected, more nights when my attempts at seduction failed. But I couldn't get it out of my mind: she's had so many opportunities to get some on the side, and since I was getting fewer opportunities for sex from her, yeah, I had to wonder if her itch was getting scratched elsewhere.

The only one I ever talked about this with was Floyd, a fellow fireman, and captain of our station. He was only a couple years older than me, and, unlike me, had a real shot at making chief when the current chief retired. If he made chief, I'd probably become station captain, where I'd almost certainly top out.

Floyd was divorced, in fact divorced twice, because he'd caught his first two wives screwing around on him. (That he'd had a dalliance or two himself didn't seem to matter.) As station captain, his shifts had changed, and he was a twelve-hour day shift commander, five days a week, and that was how he caught his second wife: her affair had been predicated on the fact that he'd previously been on the twenty-four-hour shifts, away from home, and always had time to 'clean up' after her trysts. One time, her lover had left too late for her to get everything cleaned up, and while he said nothing, Floyd knew instantly what had happened; he said that he could smell it as soon as he had walked in.

"Raleigh, old buddy, it happens, and fire fighters" – there's that fucking politically correct term again! – "and cops and military are frequent victims of it. We work these fucked up shifts, and when we get calls at the wrong time, have been awake for more than twenty-four hours when we do get home. We marry these hot chicks who think, 'Ooh, firefighter!', and figure that we're supposed to be sex gods, and then we're out of action so much of the time. It doesn't take much for some hot shot attorney or even just a scrawny, ferret-faced accountant to slide into the saddle we've vacated."

I knew that Floyd was speaking from experience: at 6'4" tall, and in great physical shape, along with what he said was a huge cock, he'd lost his second wife to a pasty-white accountant who stood maybe 5'6"!

Floyd had done the right thing: instead of confronting his wife, he contacted a private detective and gotten the real goods on her, with everything documented, and the guy who hung the horns on him identified. Kentucky is a 'no fault' divorce state, and adultery can be considered only with regard to the amount of alimony awarded if one spouse is eligible for it. He was able to sue the wimpy accountant, but didn't get much there, as his employer had fired him for bringing disrepute on the company. He won a $100,000 judgement, but hadn't collected anything; being out of work, he had no wages to garnish. The accountant was now on disability, having been crippled in an unsolved hit-and-run, so Floyd would never collect a dime.

With that, Floyd gave me the name of the PI firm he had used. They were expensive, no doubt about it, but they had the goods on his wife within two weeks.

So, my suspicions getting the better of me, I contacted them. Now, it was six weeks later, and Jim was sitting across from me in a booth in the Parkette. I had just returned from the bathroom – and in the Parkette, they weren't labelled, but one had a blue door and the other a pink – looking at the black-and-white tiled floor as I slid back into the booth.

"Here's what we've got, Mr Lytles, such as it is. Mrs Lytles has been spotted having dinner with seven different men, at different restaurants around Winchester, but in every case the men in question have been potential home buyers, and three of them have either bought a home she showed, or placed it under contract. In six of the cases, we were able to follow Mrs Lytles from the restaurant; in three of them, she went to her office, in two she went straight home, and in the last one, she went to the Kroger store off Van Meter Road. In the case in which we couldn't follow, we started, but the investigator got into an accident on the way, though her initial path was the one she would have taken to get home.

"In two instances, we were able to enter the homes she showed clients – it wasn't breaking and entering, since there was an unlocked door – and looked for evidence that sexual intercourse had occurred; no such evidence was found.

"Thanks to the access you have given us to your joint accounts, we have looked at the purchases Mrs Lytles has made; in no instance have we found any evidence of inappropriate expenditures. The meals that she had with potential home buyers were all submitted to her company as business expenditures, and all of them have been reimbursed, against commission, except for those in the last week which probably means that the company simply hasn't cut the checks yet.

"We cannot prove that your wife has not had an affair, or even just a one-night stand, but none of the work we have done has turned up any evidence that she has been cheating. There are telltale signs that cheaters leave; we haven't spotted any of them from Mrs Lytles."

Well, that was it, wasn't it? I had just blown $4,500 – fortunately, mostly money that Traci had earned, not me – and my suspicions were not confirmed. Either Traci was very careful, or she really hadn't been cheating on me, at least not recently.

Only one thing to do. "Thank you, Mr Cramer," I said, "I appreciate your report, and your honesty in telling me that I'd just be wasting money to keep having Traci investigated. How often do you get to tell men that the wife they suspected of cheating wasn't?"

"Not often, Mr Lytles, not often. But remember: all that I've said is that we have found no evidence that Mrs Lytles was cheating, not that she never had."

With that, he pushed the final invoice toward me. I wrote out the check, shook his hand, and we both left the diner. Time to head home to Traci.